SOUTH AFRICA: From Mourning to Action

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Johannesburg seemed strangely deserted in the bright Monday morning sun. Gone were the hordes of African delivery boys on bicycles that normally clog Commissioner Street. Gone were the black gas-station attendants, the elevator operators and the shop sweepers. That morning the boss made his own tea in the office, and the white housewife lugged her own parcels to the car after a round of shopping. For 95% of Johannesburg's Africans sat obstinately at home, mourning for the 68 hapless blacks cut down by the withering hail of police bullets in the Sharpeville massacre a week earlier.

Most just sat and talked of the violent events of the past days, speculated fearfully of violence still to come. But some also drank from jugs of the fiery illicit skokiaan until it was time to meet the evening trains from town. Drunk and angry, they grabbed stones, sticks and jagged pieces of metal to greet the few Africans who had disregarded Mourning Day and had gone in to work for the white man as usual. Forming a human chain across the tracks, one gang stopped a commuter train, dragged off the dozen Africans aboard and kicked and beat them. Others used roadbed ballast stones to smash train windows, dragging one young African messenger off and amputating his hands with a broad-bladed knife.

By nightfall, Orlando and Alexandra townships, where 100,000 Africans live, were dotted with scores of dead and wounded as groups moved from door to door demanding that householders burn their hated passbooks. Wisely, the police kept their distance, for this was black fighting black in black territory.

So far, in Johannesburg as well as in Cape Town, where Mourning Day was also observed, all the violence, demonstrating and pass-burning had been in native areas. No procession had yet violated the main streets of white men's cities. In most areas African passions were ebbing. But in the next days, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd's government managed to change that.

Rule by Rifle. Ignoring pleas for moderation, the determined Nationalists introduced legislation to ban both the troublesome Pan-African Congress, which had fomented the recent unrest, and the larger African National Congress—the only two groups that can speak for the nation's 9,750,000 Africans. "They want to bring the white government to its knees," cried Minister of Justice François Erasmus before Parliament. "The government has decided to bring a halt to the reign of terror." Next day Verwoerd went a step further, declared a state of emergency in all the major population centers of the nation. It gave the government power to censor the press, close or take over any business, make arrests without warrant, require workers to return to their jobs or go to jail.